Thursday, February 18, 2016

Joseph Truman (1631-71) was an ejected minister from the Nottinghamshire area. He
wrote (among other things) a Discourse of
Natural and Moral Impotency (2nd edn. 1675) which is not a medical handbook, as you
may think, but a tidy theological essay in which he sets forth the distinction
between moral ability and natural or physical ability. All the title page says is that
he was a minister ‘near Nottingham’. He was in fact Rector of Cromwell,
Notts. (Nice, that.) After 1662 he lived in Mansfield and attended the parish
church.

I’ve read that Truman was a protégé of Richard Baxter’s. He seems at
least to have met him. Baxter also wrote on natural and moral ability and
inability in his Catholick Theologie,
Plain. Pure, Peaceable, for Pacification
of the Dogmatical Word-Warriors (1675). Later this distinction was made famous by Jonathan Edwards in his Freedom of the Will. The Victorian
editor Henry Rodgers thought that Truman’s Essay
was the place where Edwards might have discovered the distinction, but there’s
no reason to think Edwards even read Truman, though he did read Francis Turretin,
where the distinction can also be found. Rodgers was so enamoured of Truman’s discourse
that in 1834 he had it reprinted, though I’ve never seen a copy.

As I say it is an interesting book, showing learning and argumentative
ability, on a topic that was of practical importance to him. Truman he is not what the late Al Read used to call a Johnny Know-All,
for one of the engaging features of the book, uncommon among theologians, is
that when he gets stuck with the argument he says he is stuck. In the text he
shows a respect for lawyers. Reading the more casuistical side to the Discourse makes it easy to see he himself
might have made a useful defence lawyer. ‘Often indicted, and once sued to an
Outlawry, which was very chargeable to him. He begg’d leave of the Justices to
plead his own Cause that he got off, tho’ the Justices were no great Friends to
Nonconformists.’ It was said of him, probably in a funeral sermon, ‘An
excellent Scholar, and wonderful clear-headed Man’. (I found both comments in Calamy Revised)

Truman holds to the moral impotency of
the unregenerate. The unregenerate have an intellect and a will and these are
warped such that there is always a prevailing motive to continue in the way of
unrighteousness. He prefers to say that they may not will a godly way, not that they cannot. The emphasis is on wilfully
persisting in a course of action, not in being necessitated to that course.Though there is no think that he is necessitated. This
is in contrast to the more Augustinian conceptuality in which it is true of
fallen men and women that non posse non peccare, impossible not to sin. Truman
prefers to say that the morally impotent are only so by vicious habits which they have voluntarily acquired.

The ‘cannot’ of unbelief is not a
natural impotency, like having an allergy to cheese, of being paralysed, but a
cannot that is an expression of wilfulness. Not to will to believe is just what unbelief is. Unbelief
is to will not, tho’ such a person has the natural power of willing . But he
cannot find it in his heart to choose to, cannot obtain of himself to will it,
due to influence of wickedness, pride and so on. Maybe he cannot want to want to
please God. Truman distinguishes between a ‘will not’ and a ‘can not’. He
quotes Gen. 37.4. 'Joseph’s brethren hated him and could not speak peaceably to
him.’ This ‘can-not' (or 'could-not') is a ‘will not’. This ‘cannot' is of a person’s own
choice. Choice for a reason, as Truman
puts it. God regenerates not by giving new faculties, a will where there was
none, but by causing people to will and to do of his good pleasure. It is impossible
that there is anything but will in this impotency.

I guess that the book probably started life as sermons, before being
worked up into a more substantial book. I say this because he calls what could
have been an ‘Essay’ a Discourse. And
the likely origin of it as sermons is
confirmed by the fact that at the end of the book Truman has a number of ‘uses’
for the doctrinehe has been setting
forth, and numerous objections to these, which he then replies to.

It is these I want briefly to ruminate on here. ‘Uses’ are (or were)
applications of the doctrine to its hearers, and they frequently brought the
sermon to a close. They prevented the sermon from being a lecture. They were
intended to make hearers of the word doers of it also. Clearly Truman did not
his readers to take his book as an essay, and to take or leave its contents as
they saw fit.

In these ‘uses’ at the end of the
book he considers a possible or likely response the case of one who is
persuaded of what is true, that he is morally unable to respond positively to
the preaching of the gospel. He might
say ‘But I cannot turn from sin to God, I
cannot leave my sinful ways’. (190) If this is genuinely intended, and is
not a mere excuse, then Truman replies, if the person means that he cannot turn to God, then that is false,
because the faculties, the understanding and will, are intact. What he should say
is that he will not. This person is
made to continue

I am resolved to
please my Flesh and Senses, come what will of it. I have such a chosen
Aversness to God and his Wayes, and such a Love to the wayes of sin, that
though the Minister should lift up his Voyce like a Trumpet, and speak and
sound as terribly as the Trumpet will as the last day, I will go on. (190)

Truman has a number of other similar objections to other ‘uses’, conveyed
in the same plain outspoken style. I
am assuming that these words are meant to convey the then-current style of
speech in the churches, and in conversation with a minister or an earnest
Christian. The sort of thing might go on at the back of the church after Pastor
Truman has been preaching. Though the
Bunyanesque manner makes me wonder, and the use of‘averseness’. If this example is not altogether
contrived (what would be the point?) but is intended to be life-like, and is a
reasonable likeness, then the degree of outspokenness and the speaker’s self-confidence
(i.e. confidence regarding a person’s self) is striking. Truman has the speaker
using the language of Scripture against himself, knowingly. Besides this, there
is the fact that an avowed unbeliever who had this self-knowledge was be in
church! Perhaps there was nowhere else to go. But maybe in those days there
were outspoken unbelievers attending church, a rather rare phenomenon today, I
think.

What do we draw from this?Even if we were to translate such sentiments
into the patois of today, do we ever hear
people speak like this? Ought we to? Does the surrounding culture prevent such
language? Ignorance as to what goes on inside the four walls of a church
building? Besides living in a day of such ignorance, are we unwitting victims
of political correctness and of modern sensitivities? Curbing speech that
‘offends’ has its effect on plain speaking in the pulpit. Has the culture of
speaking out, and allowing others to speak out, disappeared?

Here’s another comment on the Eighth Use.

Some may say, But
there is something beside Will in it; for Natural men cannot understand the
Gospel, and Scriptures, and Will of God; Carnal men cannot know them, because
they are spiritually discerned.

What would your answer be?

(Are such topics dealt with
in courses on Practical Theology in seminaries and colleges? I should hope
so. To have courses in Practical Theology it is necessary to have a theology to be practical about, as someone once said.)

We have already noticed the close connection between divine impassibilityand divine immutability, that one is an aspect of the other. They are together linked to divine eternity. God is the Creatorof all creatures in time, but is not himself in time, but is timeless, “before the ages began” (Titus 1:2). Not being in time he is not liable to change; he does not age, nor is part of his life over,as parts of all our lives are over. For him time does not pass away. He has no memory, and he “only has immortality” (1 Tim. 6:16).So there is no time in which he changes, changing his mind, experiencing onsets of moods, and so forth.The divinely-created universe is contingent in the sense that it is dependent on this God, who sustains and governs all that he has made.

Being the Creator, he is not created, and so he is not dependent on anything else. No one or no thing has created the Creator, nor does he simply happen to be. He exists independently, in the purest and most basic sense. “Who has measured the Spirit of the Lord, or what man shows him his counsel?” (Isa. 40:13). He is pure spirit: “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24), and so not constituted out of parts, as the creationis, parts composed of atoms and grains and cells, or a stream of consciousness. That would be an absurd idea in the case of the Creator; for where would these parts come from? And if we could answer that question, how could we avoid the conclusion that these parts, out of which God is composed, whatever they were, were more basic than God himself? No. God is independent, and not composed; he has a simpleunity. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord, is one” (Deut. 6:4). And so, God being one simple essence, the Trinityis not a tripartite being, but each member of the Trinity is the wholly indivisible Godhead, not partitioning the one God, but distinguishing it in ways that are basic to the Christian religion—the Father, the Son, andthe Holy Spirit. Ways of thinking that do justiceto God’s eternalbeing run like a golden thread through the confessions of the church, including the Baptist Confession elaborated in Confessing the Impassible God.

Those in the past who confessed this God, and those who now do the same, recognize that such a God is incomprehensible. This term does not mean that talk of such a God is gibberish, incoherent, but that the being of God is so extraordinary that we cannot fully get our minds around it. We cannot comprehend God, but we can apprehend him from what he reveals to us about himself in Scripture. Nevertheless, to think and to talk of God in these ways requires development of the mental discipline that is also a part of the historic religion of Christianity.

So here we have a family of ideas—simplicity, independence, necessity, eternity, immutability, impassibility—each interconnected with the others in our understanding of God’s transcendence. Divine impassibility is not some arbitrary invention,due to the quirkinessoftheologians, but it points instead to the intensely mysterious character of God. Understanding even a little of such grandeur taxes our minds, and stretches our thinking, leading us to use language that Scripture itself uses—negative language, to say what God is not, and metaphoricallanguage to portray the ways that God deals with us in creationand redemption, and stretched language to attempt to do justiceto God’s supreme eminence.

IV

What is
especially noteworthy about this book is the care and respect with which the
writers handle this biblical and confessional heritage. This is not a case of
ancestor worship, or of mere antiquarianism, but it arises from a renewed
appreciation of “historic catholic theology,” as one contributor puts it. It
has often been claimed that such theology was the result of the influence of
Hellenistic philosophy on the early thinkers of the church, with the consequent
smothering of the pure biblical teaching. But the doctrine of divine
impassibility is not affirmed as a result of philosophical speculation. Rather
as this book shows more than once, the doctrine of God of which his
impassibility is an aspect has a firm basis in sound hermeneutical principles
and doctrinal exegesis in both the Old and New Testaments. Included in this
outlook is the drawing of the distinction between literal language about God,
such as that he is the “only wise God,” immutable and so forth, and the
metaphorical language according to which God changes, and has passions and
bodily states, culminating in his supreme act of accommodation, in which he becomes
incarnate as the Christ. Both the words of God and the coming to us of the incarnated
Word of God are aspects of God’s work of sovereign grace.

This
exegetical tradition arises from a deep conviction that Scripture is one word
of God, possessing a theological unity. There are not many, diverse theologies
in Scripture. The Creator is not a creature, nor does he have creaturely
features. As we have been noting, unlike the gods of classical antiquity he is
the origin of all that is in time and space, but is himself not subject to it.
A natural question that arises is: But what about the incarnation? Does God not
enter time and space at that point? The key to thinking clearly about the incarnation
is to bear in mind that in it God became man not by ‘morphing’ into a human
being, but by the person of the Logos taking on human nature and so becoming
the two-natured Mediator, the God-man, the Savior. For in the incarnation God
did not change in his essence, but took on human nature. This also is seriously
mysterious. We shall never come near to understanding what happened, least of
all if we try to imagine what it was like to be Jesus. As the definition of Chalcedon,
formulated in AD 451, put it:

The
properties of each nature are conserved and both natures concur in one “person”
and in one hypostasis. They are not
divided or cut into two prosopa, but
are together the one and only begotten Logos of God, the Lord Jesus Christ.[1]

The
seventeenth-century Particular Baptist confessions adopted the disciplines of
thinking about the incarnation developed by the early church.

V

Finally,
the commitment to this pure Christian theism, of which divine impassibility is
an aspect, has a practical outworking, a practical theology, issuing in a
distinctive piety. To know God is to know this God, and so to know our own
creatureliness; to know something of his majesty and grace, and so by reflex to
be aware of our own insufficiency, guilt and unrighteousness. This eternal God
works out our salvation in space and time in various ways, without in any way
diminishing his goodness.And “If we are
faithless, he remains faithful, he cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:12-13).
Belief leads to action, and distinctive beliefs lead to distinctive actions. As
a consequence of who he is, such a God is not at our every beck and call.

On July 10th, 1666, the house of Anne
Bradstreet, the wife of a colonial administrator, burned down at night. The
fire awoke the family, and all escaped from the building and watched the fire
engulfing everything. In the poem that she wrote in memory of this occurrence
these words occur:

She
recognized herself to be in the hands of her eternal God, and believed that
what he willed was best. God’s gracious purposes for his people remain unchangeable
even if the reasons why he permits difficulties are often not presently disclosed
to them.

VI

This
book can be said to present an interdisciplinary exposition and so a cumulative
defense of divine impassibility and of the doctrine of God of which that is an
aspect. Each line of argument strengthens and supports the other. Its foundation
in Scripture, and the hermeneutics employed, show the doctrine to be not
speculative or abstract but to have its foundation in the varied data of the
both Testaments of the Bible. The chapters on history show that divine
impassibility is not a recent whimsy or the peculiar invention of a Christian
sect, but the historic catholic faith. Those on the confession and the doctrine
of God set out its Baptist pedigree, and the connectedness of impassibility
with other distinctions made in the doctrine of God, and their overall
coherence. Each line of enquiry sensitizes the palate to taste the others.
There is a polemical strand throughout the book, contrasting this view with
those of Open Theism and aberrant statements from contemporary Calvinists and others.
But these arguments are used not to score points but to set forth and make even
clearer the positive, historic teaching on divine impassibility, by contrasting
it with other currently-held views.

I am honored to have been asked to write this
Foreword, and delighted with what I have read. Confessing the Impassible Godis heartily recommended.

About Me

Each Month

In general, early each month the draft of a paper on a topic in philosophical theology is posted, and often a shorter more occasional piece in mid-month.

Augustine

'It is a matter of no moment in the city of God whether he who adopts the faith that brings omen to God adopts it in one dress and manner of life or another, so long as he lives in conformity with the commandments of God. And hence, when philosophers themselves become Christians, they are compelled, indeed, to abandon their erroneous doctrines, but not their dress and mode of living, which are no obstacle to religion.'